alt Hacker NewsThis is a combination of nonsense and non sequiturs. Why didn't you mention my non-Christian example of flagrant anti-intellectualism at all, or any of my examples of Christians promoting intellectualism? Are you trying to argue that Christians are somehow different from other religious people?
My central point, as I said, was, "Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed." Are you implicitly claiming that Christians don't care about intellectualism?
My best hypothesis is that you just did some kind of keyword search and then recited a couple of marginally relevant polemical talking points you'd previously memorized, without any regard to the actual conversation you were injecting them into.
Nothing I said was nonsense or a non-sequitor. You’re citing a bunch of historical myths to support your point, so I am pointing those out.
As for your point itself, I don’t think “religion” is a meaningful category. It’s unclear to me Christianity and say — Shinto have some common trait that holds them together. Even Christianity and Islam have vastly different goals and ideas about what the purpose of “religion” is. So I don’t think it’s meaningful to say “religious people tend to care about intellectualism.”
Communist Russia cared a lot about intellectualism — they promoted and persecuted many intellectuals and academics, just like the Catholic Church. The common denominator between the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church is surely not that they were both religious. To assert that communism is a religion would only further prove my point above.
The Catholic Church during the counter-reformation, its most highly censorious and intolerant period, was, like the Soviet Union, a society experiencing intense paranoia and saw itself under siege by foreign and internal enemies and needing to protect itself. This was an attitude that lead to atrocities, but it’s difficult for me to see how this has anything to do with religion as such given that the same pattern happens in secular culture all the time. Politically powerful people (or those with political ambition) tend to care about these things is the real thing going on here, especially if they perceive potential threats from the intellectuals. Intellectuals are not unique targets in this respect.
Many “religions” promote having a literate class to be educated in both their scriptures and in wider philosophy because it’s necessary to socially reproduce their own teachings. In that sense they care about intellectualism but we do the same thing to reproduce American, French, British, etc. secular culture, and good luck to public school teachers who want to buck the curriculum (I don’t particularly think they should, but they’ll have issues).